Here, we analyse the benefits from extending the transmission bandwidth as a solution to increase the throughput of optical communication systems based on single-mode silica-based optical fibres. As the signal bandwidth is increased to 10 THz and beyond, the nonlinear effect of inter-channel stimulated Raman scattering (ISRS), becomes increasingly important, as it causes power to be transferred from high to low frequency channels and thus changing the nonlinear interactions along the fibre channel. Previous attempts have tried to answer this question, in [1]} a throughput of 800 Tb/s was estimated for a bandwidth of 50 THz using several simplifications for the calculations and not including the ISRS effect, and in [2]} the system throughput was estimated in the presence of ISRS for a bandwidth up to 20 THz reporting continuous throughput increase by using larger bandwidths.
Here we quantify the potentially achievable throughputs for bandwidths up to 33 THz in a fibre channel impaired by amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, Kerr nonlinearity and ISRS, considering wavelength dependent attenuation and nonlinear coefficient, and nonlinear signal-noise interactions to complement previous analysis.
